Posh

Synopsis

Following a sell out season at the Royal Court, Posh transfers to the West End.

Taking place in an oak-panelled room in Oxford, Posh at the Duke of York's Theatre is the story of ten young bloods with cut-glass vowels and deep pockets are meeting, intent on restoring their right to rule. Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and bloody good wine. But this isn't just a jolly: they're planning a revolution. Welcome to the Riot Club!

Posh is written by Laura Wade, a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme whose play Breathing Corpses, won the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Pearson Playwrights Best Play Award, the George Devine Award and an Olivier Award Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. Posh is currently being adapted into a feature film.

Director Lyndsey Turner's work at the Royal Court includes Contractions, A Miracle and Our Private Life. Other theatre successes include There Is A War (National Theatre), Nocturnal (Gate); My Romantic History (Traverse, Bush, Sheffield Theatres) and The Lesson (Arcola).

The cast for Posh in the West End includes Max Bennett, Leo Bill, Pip Carter, Jolyon Coy, Richard Goulding, Edward Killingback, Harry Lister Smith, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Charlotte Lucas, Joshua McGuire, Tom Mison, Jessica Ransom, Steffan Rhodri and Simon Shepherd.
 
Age guidance 14+

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 24 May 2012

The upper-class bad boys are back in town in this timely Royal Court transfer of Laura Wade’s astonishing, metaphorical and brutal Posh, in which the dressed-up members of an Oxford dining club come rapping alive from the gilded frames of ancestral portraits in a gentlemen’s inner London sanctum.

This brilliant scene follows the set-up: the revival of the Riot Club in times of political consensus and lily-livered drifting by young Tom Hollander lookalike Guy Bellingford (Joshua Maguire) and his ennobled uncle Jeremy (Simon Shepherd); in the same hushed room, at the end, Jeremy sounds the all-clear for licensed posh barbarism and hints at not only a cover-up, but a political coup.

On first viewing in 2010, before the general election, Posh seemed an exuberant satire on the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, where the elite members – who, in the past, have included the current Pr...

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Latest User Review

Jeremy Baker - 13 June 2012:

I longed for a likeable character to latch onto. They were all just privileged yobs and dim ones at that. But it was amusing and kept me interested. What happened to the landlord?...

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